Char Siu BBQ Pork (蜂蜜叉烧)

Plus, a from-scratch Char Siu sauce

So, this time I’m really excited to share the recipe of how to cook Cantonese Char Siu pork at home, from scratch.

We’re doing the rather labor intensive traditional from-scratch Char Siu sauce, together with a roasting technique using a Western-style charcoal grill to mimic the Chinese restaurant oven. But don’t be intimidated – you can also do this using bottled Char Siu sauce and an oven. We’ve combined these two recipes in the same reddit post/video, which I hope doesn’t get overly confusing.

Ingredients

Ingredients for your roast:

1. Fatty Boston Butt (梅肉) and/or Pork Belly (腩肉) and/or Pork Neck (猪颈肉), ~2.5 lbs. The amount of pork is totally up to you (the roasting is mostly done by ratio), as is the cut of pork. Meirou is one of the traditional cuts – it’s basically a Boston Butt with some fat still attached to it. Probably the best if you’re abroad is pork belly, which is generally a bit leaner outside of China and the easiest to get the texture right. Our personal favourite is pork neck, but as it’s slightly unconventional we did half meirou half pork neck in the video.

2. Char Siu sauce (叉烧酱) – bottled or homemade, 1 bottle. We really like our homemade Char Siu sauce, but you can use bottled in a pinch. Lee Kum Kee is the standard, and you can get it online real easily worldwide. If you’re outside of China and don’t live near a Chinatown, using bottled is probably the route you wanna take, unless you’re up for a (really tasty) challenge. We’re going to be using this for our marinade and for basting.

3. Light soy sauce (生抽), ~3 tablespoons. This is for our roasting marinade, which is done by ratio. Our marinade is 3 parts Char Siu sauce and 1 part light soy sauce.

4. Honey, (蜂蜜) ~3 tablespoons. This is for the basting sauce, which done by ratio. Our basting sauce is 1 part Char Siu sauce and 1 part honey. This is what gives this dish the name ‘honey Char Siu’ (蜜汁叉烧).

Ingredients for your homemade Char Siu Sauce, if using (I hope you do!):

1. Red Miso (面豉), 3 tablespoons. This is the key ingredient that makes Char Siu, char siu. There’s no sub for this, this is a critical ingredient. Making from-scratch Char Siu without red miso would be like making an American barbecue sauce without vinegar. Ideally, you want a nice quality one – we used some from a little workshop outside of Guangzhou that still makes it according to the old methods. If you’re in China, the brand fengxianhua (凤仙花) makes a real solid one. If you can’t find that or if you’re abroad, a Japanese red miso paste works real nice too (I prefer the good Chinese brands to standard Japanese red miso here, but Japanese red miso is safe in that it’s way better than some of the crappier Chinese brands).

2. Maltose (麦芽糖), 3 tablespoons. This is a sweetener that’s going to give the Char Siu sauce its characteristic sheen. It’s used in a lot of Chinese roast dishes – probably most famously Peking Duck. If you can’t find this, you can use honey here too (the super old, traditional recipe uses honey), but just be careful – Maltose is really not overly sweet, so make sure you’re using a natural honey.

3. The liquor from Red Fermented Tofu (南乳), 1 tablespoon. This is not only going to help us arrive at that characteristic Char Siu color, but it’ll also add a nice sour-fermented undertone to the sauce. We are only using the liquid from this, as the fermented tofu itself has a really strong taste. If you’re making a massive batch of this – say, quadrupling the recipe – you could add in half a piece if you really want.

4. Red Yeast Rice (红曲), ¼ tsp ground -or- Hungarian sweet paprika, 1.5 tsp. This is an optional ingredient, as it’s mostly for color. We used some red yeast rice that we ground up… but for all of you guys that are abroad, I always like to search on Amazon to see what ingredients are available for you. I couldn’t find this, so if do you want to help that color along, feel free to use some sweet Hungarian paprika. I tested this for one batch - it didn’t really affect the flavor at all, so go nuts.

5. Rock sugar (冰糖), 50g. Maltose isn’t really overly sweet, so this is going to help us arrive at that mellow sweetness that Charsiu has. You could carefully play around with white sugar if you don’t have this.

6. Water, 2.5 cups. This is going to be the base for our lushui (卤水) liquid, which I’ll go into when discussing the process.

7. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 3 1/3 Tablespoons. Apologies for the weird amount. What we’re doing is using a ¼ cup soy sauce, 2 tsp of which is dark soy sauce.

8. Dark Soy Sauce (老抽), 2 tsp.

9. Liaojiu (料酒), a.k.a. Shaoxing Rice Wine, ¼ cup. I’ve seen some recipes that swear by using rose rice wine. I don’t think it really makes a difference, but that ain’t the trench I’m willing to die in – if you feel compelled, use Rose rice wine.

10. Green onion whites (葱白), ~1/2 cup minced. Make sure you’re only using the white part of the green onion, as we’re going to fry this. Apologies, I forgot to weigh my ginger and green onion for you guys here.

11. Ginger (姜), ~1/4 cup minced.

12. Star anise (八角), 8-10. Critical. (I’m going to list a bunch of spices here, which I’ve split up into ‘critical’ and ‘suggested’. There’s certain spices that this sauce absolutely needs, and some that’ll just make it better. In general, don’t be overly paranoid about balance with the spices, if you can find some of the ‘suggested’ spices but not others, just toss in what you can find)

13. Cinnamon or Cassia bark (桂皮), 2 sticks. Critical.

14. Shajiang powder (沙姜粉), a.k.a Sand Ginger, Kencur, Cutcherry powder, ½ tsp. Critical. This might be a tougher spice for you guys abroad to find. It’s one of the four plants that’s sometimes called ‘galangal’, and tastes sort of like a peppery ginger? It’s used a bit in Cantonese cooking, but also Malay and Indonesian. I looked on USA Amazon and found this under the name ‘cutcherry powder’. Great ingredient.

15. Whole Cloves (丁香), ~12. Suggested.

16. Black Cardamom (草果), 2 pods. Suggested. Pound em with a knife and make sure they’re slightly cracked.

17. Dried and Aged Tangerine Peel (陈皮), 1 peel. Suggested. Make sure you prep these by soaking them in water and scratching off its ‘pith’ (think of an orange – the pith is the bitter white stuff on the interior of the peel). Make sure you do a real bang-up job scratching off the pith – it can really infect the sauce with bitterness if you’re not careful.

18. Liquorice root (甘草), about 8 small slices. Suggested. This is another thing I should have likely weighed as slices aren’t standard. You can get a rough feeling for the quantity we used from watching the video.

19. Luohanguo (罗汉果), ½ dried fruit. Suggested. This is a dried fruit that has an interesting flavour and a mellow sweetness, and often used in herbal teas. I was actually surprised to see this available on Amazon under the name ‘Luo Han Guo’, thank god for the hippies and their love of herbal medicine I suppose haha.

Process

Process to Make Char Siu Sauce:

1. Fry the aromatics. Fry your minced white-part-of-green-onion and ginger is the smallest oil that you could muster, about 1 minute or so on medium heat.

2. Add in the liaojiu (rice wine), then the water and the two soy sauces, then the spices. My addition of the liaojiu (rice wine) first is probably just a deep seeded reflex from Western cooking’s technique of deglazing. So also add in your water, the soy sauces, and all of your dried spices except the shajiang (cutcherry powder) – that’s going in later.

3. Simmer on low for 30-90 minutes. What we’re doing here is basically making what’s called a lushui (卤水), which is a braising base of soy sauce and spices that is used in a ton of Chinese dishes. There’s a whole category of awesome Cantonese food that uses this base – which we’ll try to teach in a future video. Here I wasn’t overly paranoid about the lushui reducing, but we’ve got to use about a cup of this, so add a touch of water if it’s going a little too crazy.

4. Strain out the spices and aromatics. The reason we made this lushui first before adding the thicker ingredients is that if you just added in sugars and thicker sauces together with the spices, the sauce is gunna stick to your spices and your yield will much, much less.

5. Add in ¾ cup of the reserved lushui liquid, the red miso, the liquid of the red fermented tofu, the shajiang (cutcherry powder), the ground red yeast rice (or sweet paprika), and the chunk of rock sugar. Then simmer. We’re going to be simmering this on low until the rock sugar dissolves. We want to try to bring those flavors together and let it reduce a touch, and the time that it takes the rock sugar to dissolve is really about right. Spoon the sauce over the rock sugar to help it along, and add in a couple tablespoons of your reserved lushui liquid in case it’s reducing a little too much (for the batch that I did in the video, I had to do this once). Take a look at the video at 5:08 for a visual of how thick we’re aiming this to be.

6. Turn off the heat, add in the Maltose. Word of warning – if you’ve never worked with Maltose before, I swear to Jesus it might be the stickiest substance known to mankind. Stir that in, and incorporate into the Char Siu.

7. Jar it!

Procedure for Marinating:

1. Cut your pork into strips. No matter what roasting method you use, you’re gunna want to get the same sort of pork strips. You know those iconic strips of Char Siu that hang in Hong Kong Chacaanteng? That’s what you’re aiming for. Roughly 1 inch high and 2 inches wide – for the grilling method you’re not going to quite be able get the same length that the restaurants have, but it’ll be fine I promise. For pork belly, they’re conveniently in little strips for you.

2. Make your Marinade. The marinade will be three parts Charsiu sauce – either bottled or homemade – and one part soy sauce.

3. Poke holes in your Charsiu with a fork and toss it in a bag to marinate. Poking holes with your fork will theoretically help the marinade go into the pork (I know the issue of ‘poking holes’ is controversial, poke or don’t poke… ain’t none of my business). Then massage the meat and make sure the marinade is even.

4. Marinate, 4-48 hours. Char Siu strips are one of the ‘thickest’ things you could marinate in Chinese cooking, so the longer time is going to be pretty important. You could get away with an afternoon or overnight marinade for a softer meat like belly, but for the meirou/Boston Butt cut especially you’d really want to aim for around 48 hours.

Process for Charcoal Grill Roasting:

1. Gather your materials. We’re gunna need a Western-style charcoal grill here, a cast iron dutch oven (or other large pot) that’s deep enough to let strips of Char Siu hang, aluminium foil to cover the bottom of the pot, and some handle-less metal skewers (I just removed the handles from mine).

2. Set up a two zone charcoal fire, and nestle the Dutch oven into the cool side. If you want to soak some lychee or Applewood chips to get a touch of smoke, I think that’s a pretty cool idea I haven’t tried yet.

3. Skewer your Char Siu strips at the very top of the strip, and cover the top with a wet paper towel. The tops of the strips next to the skewer have a tendency to burn. The wet paper towel keeps the top cooler so that the strip cooks evenly. Aim for 3-5 strips of Char Siu hanging from each skewer.

4. Hang your Char Siu ‘skewer’ over the Dutch oven to let it cook, periodically moving and basting the Char Siu. For me, these cooked for about 90 minutes – your fire and my fire might be different though, so grab an instant read thermometer if you got one. You might also want to periodically rearrange your skewers as the ones closer to the charcoal will tend to cook a little faster. Three times during cooking, I took the Char Siu out and basted them with a brush. Again, the basting sauce is 1 part Char Siu, and 1 part honey.

5. Once finished, brush one more time with charsiu, once with oil, then let it rest. For these, if you got an instant read, what I like to do is take out the Dutch oven and pork skewers once they get to be around 67 degrees Celsius (150F). Once you brush them with the oil and Char Siu sauce one last time, hang them back in the Dutch oven to rest in a hanging position for about 30-45 minutes. The residual heat from the cast iron plus the natural cooking which resting will get them about perfect.

Process for oven roasting:

1. Pre-heat your oven to 275 degrees (130C) Fahrenheit, and put the Charsiu strips in a roasting tray. If you’re like us and don’t have a roasting tray, just get creative – the air should be able to circulate underneath the strips.

2. Roast your Charsiu in the oven for one hour, flipping them and basting them every 15 minutes. Your basting sauce will be one part honey and one part Char Siu sauce (either bottled or homemade).

3. Broil them for a two minutes each side under 425 degree Fahrenheit heat (220C), then let the Char Siu rest, preferably in a hanging position. I don’t really need to broil these in my opinion, but if you really want a light black char, go for it. Once they’re done, brush the Char Siu one last time with Char Siu sauce and oil, and let it rest for 30-45 minutes before chopping (preferably you’d find a way to hang these suckers).

A note about homemade vs. bottled Char Siu sauce:

The obvious question is – is the traditional, homemade Char Siu sauce worth it? My answer is an emphatic yes – the red miso gives it a much deeper umami taste, and the spice mixture gives it a much more complex flavour. Lee Kum Kee will also add in sugar, which isn’t as nice and mellow as the maltose/rock sugar combination.

But… I’d venture to say that they’re the same category of ‘thing’. This ain’t like the difference been homemade mayonnaise and store bought – a much better comparison would be the difference between a real good homemade American-style Barbecue sauce and, say, Sweet Baby Ray’s. And just like Sweet Baby Ray’s, Lee Kum Kee is one of the better brands for Char Siu sauce. If you don’t feel like sourcing all those ingredients, no one’s going to bat an eye if you use store-bought.

Note on using up the spices:

We wanted to give you guys a few ideas on ways you could use up some of these spices (barring cooking more variety of Chinese dishes, lol), just in case you end up buying them and they start to collect dust:

1. Grind some spices up and make your own five spice powder. ‘Five spice’ will generally have star anise, cloves, cinnamon/cassia, fennel, and Sichuan peppercorn. But five spice isn’t really one recipe – you can also add some tangerine peel, the liquorice root, and the shajiang.

2. Make nanru peanuts as a snack. Marinate some raw peanuts in that red-fermented tofu together with some water and sugar for about an hour. Drain your peanuts and toast some star anise and liquorice root. Splash a little baijiu or rice wine or your liquor of choice a few times until the peanuts are cooked.

3. Make a Maltose syrup. If you’re weird like me and actually prefer the consistency of Aunt Jemima “maple syrup” because you grew up on it, much tastier than those bottles is to make a maltose syrup. Take your maltose and heat it up, adding enough water to get to the proper consistency. Add a little bit of proper maple syrup for flavouring.

4. Make an herbal tea. Take your luohanguo (you could also add some liquorice root) and add it to boiling water, letting it steep for five minutes. Alternatively, you could use do the same with that tangerine peel, but also add some sugar. I’m not a big TCM sort of guy but they are nice if you have a sore throat, especially the luohanguo and liquorice root combination.

5. Chew on liquorice root. Some Italians use it as a mouth freshener. Who knew? I tried it, ain’t for me, but if you like it go nuts.

6. Make Akamiso Soup. Use your red miso to make Japanese Akamiso soup. I’m probably not the person to ask on Miso soup (some other commenters here would probably know better than me)… but IIRC the base is just a simple dashi and red miso.

7. Make miso butter. Make a compound butter with red miso. I know many people use a light miso for miso butter, but the saltiness of the red miso seems to work really well in a compound butter. Just google ‘miso butter’ for ideas – there’s a ton of different uses for it.

8. Grind up spices and use as a rub. The dish ‘orange chicken’ isn’t super well known these days in China, but is originally a sauceless sort of deep fried chicken (usually pork in China) that uses ground tangerine peel, salt, sugar, and cornstarch as a rub. It’s delicious. Also, for a lot of these spices, you can completely use them as part of a rub in American-style grilling. Star anise, cinnamon, and even clove can tossed in with some other spices for a rub for grilled or roast pork. Shajiang goes great with chicken.